Scan your WP blog with WP scan

I am going to find WordPress Vulnerabilities on my blog with WP scan. WPScan is a black box WordPress Security Scanner written in Ruby which attempts to find known security weaknesses within WordPress installations. Its intended use it to be for security professionals or WordPress administrators to asses the security posture of their WordPress installations. The code base is Open Source and licensed under the GPLv3.

Download and Install WPScan

Before we get started with the installation, it is important to note that wpscan will not work on Windows systems, so you will need access to a Linux or OSX installation to proceed.

WPScan is hosted on Github, so if it is not already installed we will need to install the git packages before we can continue. Once git is installed, we need to install the dependencies for wpscan and Ruby.

Now we can to clone the wpscan package from github.

cd /opt/
git clone https://github.com/wpscanteam/wpscan.git

Now we can move to the newly created wpscan directory and install the necessary ruby gems through bundler.

Now that we have wpscan installed, we will walk through using the tool to search for potentially vulnerable files on our WordPress installation. Some of the most important aspects of wpscan are its ability to enumerate not only plugins and themes, but users and timthumb installations as well. WPScan can also perform bruteforce attacks against WordPress– but that is outside of the scope of this article.